SHF: Small: Collaborative Research: Tracing and Reasoning about Changing Artifacts

变更贯穿于整个软件开发过程。软件可能会根据市场力量、客户需求的变化或新的硬件和软件依赖性进行更改。变更的线索，连同这些变更背后的决策，沿着，通常是短暂的，很少被开发团队直接捕获。 源代码偏离了解释代码背后的动机和决策的需求和设计文档（以及其他工件）。在维护这些工件和代码之间的一致性方面有很高的开销。项目时间表的截止日期很紧，几乎没有时间明确地记录代码更改背后的决策。因此，进一步的代码修改往往是昂贵的，因为软件工程师缺乏对过去的decision.This项目的目的是调查一个轻量级的，灵活的，系统的方法来识别和连接相关的变化，以支持未来的维护活动的理解。通过利用可追溯性和重构技术，我们可以将变更表示为一级工件，以便软件工程师可以更好地理解变更的性质以及它如何影响相关工件。我们的方法是新颖的，因为它允许开发人员推理各种各样的变化，从高级概念到跨越几个模块的低级代码。我们还研究了弥合这些连接之间的任何差距的技术。该方法适用于维护遗留系统或从其他组织获取软件的组织。这些结果对于任何中型或大型开发环境在吸收新人员和协调分布式开发方面也是有价值的。

Change pervades the entire software development process. Software may be changed in response to market forces, changing customer requirements, or new hardware and software dependencies. The thread of changes, along with the decisions behind those changes, is often transient and is rarely directly captured by a development team. Source code drifts away from requirement and design documents (and other artifacts) that explain the motivations and decisions behind the code. There is a high overhead in maintaining consistency between these artifacts and the code. Project schedules have tight deadlines, with little or no time to explicitly document the decisions behind code changes. Thus, further code modifications are often expensive because the software engineers lack the understanding of past decisions.This project aims to investigate a lightweight, flexible, and systematic approach to identifying and connecting related changes to support future maintenance activities. By leveraging traceability and refactoring techniques, we can represent change as a first-class artifact so that software engineers can better understand the nature of change and how it impacts related artifacts. Our approach is novel because it allows developers to reason about changes as varied as high-level concepts to low-level code that cuts across several modules. We also investigate techniques for bridging any gaps between these connections.The approach is applicable to organizations that maintain legacy systems or acquire software from other organizations. The results will also be valuable to any medium- or large-scale development context in assimilating new personnel and in coordinating distributed development.